


Survivors

by Duck_Life



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fear, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 23:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: The X-Men vanish. Cecilia tries to help in the aftermath.





	Survivors

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I know Cecilia was shown in Age of X-Man but so was Dani so. Let's just pretend she didn't go to the beach at the end of Disassembled, yeah?

Sam Guthrie joined the X-Men at about the same time Cecilia did. He was being promoted from the junior leagues, while she was coming in from the outside. A doctor. Someone  _ normal _ . She hadn’t seen the X-Men as the incredible opportunity Sam seemed to view it as; for her, it was more of a last resort. Or a horrible twist of fate. 

The first time she meets him, she’s focused on getting the high-tech bomb out of Scott Summers’ chest cavity, and Sam just seems like a hick from Kansas (Tennessee? Kentucky?) getting in her way. 

But then he shows up with (almost) all the medical supplies she could possibly need, incredibly fast and on incredibly short notice. It’s not an exaggeration to call it kind of a miracle. (She still hassles him about neglecting to grab a scalpel— but Wolverine’s claws work well enough, once they’re sterilized.) 

When things finally calm down (as calm as they ever are with the X-Men), and Cecilia starts settling in at the mansion, she gets to know Sam better. Turns out he also lost his father at a young age. They have that in common. 

Unlike her, he acts like he wouldn’t know ambition if it came up and bit him on the ass. All Sam seems to want to do is make everyone get along and tell dumb riddles. 

“Hey,” he says one time while they’re helping Storm wallpaper the lounge, “plane crashes right on the border o’ Canada and the U.S. Where do they bury the survivors?” 

Cecilia rolls her eyes and pastes more wallpaper up. “You don’t bury the survivors,” she says. Because she’s a genius. And because she’s heard that one before. 

Different as they are, Cecilia and Sam become friends in their time on the X-Men.

So when Pixie hauls Sam into the infirmary looking almost-dead, his face covered in blood, Cecilia doesn’t react like a doctor, she reacts like a friend. “Cannonball?” she asks, crossing the infirmary, distraught. Shatterstar, who woke up shortly after Rictor left to help in the battle, reaches Pixie immediately and helps her lift Sam’s limp body onto one of the cots. “What happened?” Cecilia demands. 

“He tried to take on X-Man directly,” Pixie says, sounding infuriated. Cecilia can tell she’s not so much angry at Sam as she is at being taken out of the fight herself, even temporarily. “I have to go back. He— he’ll be okay, right?” she says, concern leaking through. 

Cecilia glances from Pixie to Sam, looking at the gray pallor of his skin, the blood that’s still dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “Yes,” she says, and she knows it’s mostly a lie and Pixie probably knows too.

But somebody has to get back to the fight. 

“Right, okay,” Pixie says, voice pitched unusually high. “I have to get back.”

“I’ll come too,” Shatterstar insists, his hands reaching for his swords.

“No,” Cecelia says, floundering for an excuse. “No… Shatterstar, if you’re well enough to help I need you here, helping with triage.” 

Shatterstar hesitates, and Cecilia thinks back to the instant she and Rictor heard Jean Grey’s message. 

_ To me, my X-Men, Jean had said, and they had all heard it. “I gotta go,” Rictor says, looking from Cecilia to Shatterstar’s sleeping body, stretched along the cot. “Are you…?” _

_ “I’m staying. I’ll be here to tend to our injured,” she says. “And there will be injured.” _

_ “Right.” Rictor pauses, then leans down and presses a soft kiss to Shatterstar’s forehead. “Take… take care of him, okay?” _

_ “I will.”  _

Shatterstar listens to her, and stays while Pixie vanishes (“ _ Sihal novarum chinoth! _ ”). “Great. Can you get me my scanner?” she asks Shatterstar. Keeping him here is only partly about needing the assistance. 

She’s keeping her promise to Rictor. 

It turns out Sam’s got internal bleeding throughout his chest and she needs to operate. He also needs a blood transfusion. 

“Use mine,” Shatterstar says. “Guthrie and I… we have the same blood type. And I have a limited healing factor, that may help him.”

So Shatterstar turns out to be useful after all. 

  
  


Cecilia’s back is turned when she hears Sam says, in a weak, scratchy voice, “What’s up, Doc?”

She whirls around, having to restrain herself from hugging him. “You’re okay! Thank God. Thank  _ me _ , actually.” She braces her hands on the corner of the cot, looking him over more thoroughly. Then she shines her penlight in his eyes, and he winces. “Sorry, but you suffered head trauma. I need to check and see… can you tell me your name?”

“Samuel Zachary Guthrie,” he says. 

“Can you tell me  _ my _ name?” 

“Cecilia Bedilia Reyes.” He smiles. “I don’t actually know your middle name.” 

 

As soon as Sam can stand, he’s itching to get back to the fight. “C’mon, Shatty,” he says, but he’s limping. “You good to teleport?”

“I am,” Shatterstar asserts, drawing his swords. “Let’s—”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa,” Cecilia scowls, holding her hands up to both of the overeager X-Force alums like a raptor trainer. “Neither of you is going anywhere. You’re staying put until I say you’re good to go. My infirmary, my rules.”

“Our friends are out there, Doc,” Sam says. “’Sides, I’ve got Shatty’s alien healing factor roarin’ through my veins. I’m fine, he’s fine, we’re going.” 

And, well. He does have a point. But if she doesn’t have any more patients here, then maybe her forcefield can do more good than her medical expertise. “I’m coming with you, then.”

Shatterstar crosses his swords in an X, and there’s a flash of light. Moments later, Shatterstar, Sam and Cecilia stumble onto a distant shore.

The ground is singed, with deep lines gouged into the wet sand. There’s no one there. 

Shatterstar turns on Sam. “You pictured the wrong place,” he says. “You—”

“No,” Cecilia says, horror leaching into her voice. There’s something on the ground, barely out of reach of the tide, glinting in the sunlight. She bends down to pick it up.

Bishop’s X insignia. 

“I don’t get it,” Sam says, jogging across the sand as if he might find the X-Men just a couple of yards down the beach. But the place is deserted, ghostly. “They were just here.”

“Oh, God,” Cecilia murmurs, bringing one hand to her mouth as the realization sets in. “Oh, God, no…”

“Rictor?” Shatterstar shouts, running up the shoreline, farther than Sam. “Rictor?” He cups his hands around his mouth, yelling, “Rictor! Julio!” 

“This can’t be happening,” Cecilia says, and from the devastated look on Sam’s face, he agrees. “They’re all gone. They just… vanished.”

“Julio,” Shatterstar shouts again, and he crashes to his knees in the surf. 

“This can’t be happening.” 

  
  


When the attacks first start, Cecilia doesn't actually see anything. She hears it all, though. The boom-crash of explosives, and then teenagers screaming. 

Sam and Shatterstar are gone, off with X-Force, and what remains of the school is unprotected. Except by her, Jonothan Starsmore and a couple dozen scared children. 

“The Morlocks!” Cecilia yells, leading Xi'an Coy Manh's twin siblings down the hall. She calls out to Indra, to Oya. “Get to the sewers. Get everybody to the sewers.”

She is standing far away when Alani Ryan is hit, and it's like she can't move, can't run anymore. There's a huge scorch mark on the ground, and Loa's body, and Cecilia loses all the breath in her lungs. 

Chamber's voice breaks through her horrified stupor. <We gotta go, Dr. Reyes. We gotta go.>

 

When Callisto encounters them, she doesn't look pleased. “To what do I owe the honor?” she growls. 

“We need sanctuary,” Cecilia says. “It's a massacre up there.”

Callisto's mouth twitches. All she says is, “Interesting choice of words,” and she steps aside. 

Grimlock is the one who rolls out the welcome wagon. “Hey, X-Men,” she says, waving at them exaggeratedly. “I'll just…” Her face falls, like she just got a read on their situation, just saw through their eyes what had happened up above. “Oh.  _ Oh _ . I'm… you guys, I'm so sorry.” Cecilia isn't sure what to say back. She's sorry too. “We have enough spare mattresses. I'll… I'll show you, this way.”

 

Cecilia can’t sleep, and it’s not just because she’s lying in a dark, dank sewer. She can’t stop replaying today’s events— the events of the past couple of weeks, really. The X-Men are dead. Loa is dead. It’s like Zero Tolerance all over again but  _ worse _ somehow. Because she was helpless then, untrained and uninformed, burying her head in the sand.

She’s not supposed to be helpless anymore… but she is, anyway. 

On the other side of the cavernous sewer they’re camped in, Velocidad is crying.  _ Where do you bury the survivors? _ Cecilia thinks to herself as she shuts her eyes and tries fruitlessly to fall asleep. 

 


End file.
